Image Details
This striking rock pinnacle is called the Old Man of Storr, named after the mountain, The Storr, of which it is part, and it is a landmark that can be seen from a long way off as you drive up the eastern coast of the Isle of Skye. Beneath it is Loch Fada with its tiny island.
Usually my visits to Skye are accompanied by uniform grey cloud, discouraging my hope of getting striking landscapes, but on this occasion, arriving in the late afternoon, I immediately headed north to photograph this landscape, aiming to get there before the sun dropped too far behind the hills and plunge the loch into shade.
North-west Highland Place Names
The landscape of the North-west Highlands and the Gaelic language are intimately connected. Other languages have contributed to the richness of our place names, notably Norse, but the North-west Highlands have for centuries been a Gaelic landscape. In listing the meanings of place names I have relied on authoritative sources wherever possible. For further information about sources please refer to North-west Highland Place Names in the main menu.
Loch Fada; Fada is the Gaelic word for ‘long’.
Skye; Skye's history includes the influence of Gaelic, Norse and English speaking peoples and the relationships between their names for the island are not straightforward. The Gaelic name for the "Isle of Skye" is An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (or Sgiathanach, a more recent and less common spelling). The meaning of this name is not clear. Various explanations have been proposed, such as the ‘winged isle’ or ‘the notched isle’ but no definitive solution has been found to date.
The Old Man of Storr; There is some uncertainty in the origin of this name. It is argued by some that it is derived from the old Norse word stórr meaning ‘big’ and thus might mean ‘the great man’. Another explanation concerns the word starr, defined in Dineen’s Irish-English dictionary as a ‘projection, a stump, tooth or tusk’, and this is a description that seems appropriate. Peter Drummond’s book 'Scottish Hill Names : Their Origin and Meaning' goes into this in more depth.
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